Half of mental health disorders have their onset before age 15, and there is growing evidence that the teenage brain undergoes significant change. This time of heightened brain plasticity offers a valuable opportunity to try and foster resilience and potentially prevent the onset of mental illness.

Awakening from sedation and finding yourself restrained by the neck and your limbs locked into a sealed case sounds like something from a Kafkaesque prison dystopia, yet this terrifying device is one of many tools used by researchers underplaying the suffering of animals inside their laboratories.

Some gay people might feel that finding a gay gene might diminish prevalent homophobia, but this is naive. Racism has not diminished because we know that blackness or whiteness is genetic.
But scientists still treat us like rats in a lab and look for 'causes'. I have been told I am a lesbian because my mother smoked and drank whilst carrying me.

We've seen examples of this in the past where researchers have been able to highlight aspects of lifestyle that affect the risk of developing disease. This past week marked the 50th anniversary of the US Surgeon General report on smoking, which for the first time in the US highlighted the significant health harms to the general public from smoking.

If you are a gamer then games like Deus Ex:Human Revolution, Splice or Pandemic will probably be common names to you. These are all titles of well regarded and successful video games, but more than that all of them are video games that draw ideas and inspiration from biomedical sciences.